Emerson's Literary Philosophy

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Notes

1 For a frank if discreet acknowledgement that he is ‘not going to delve into textual analysis’, see the footnote to his reading of the essay ‘Experience’: 106.

2 Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 15.

3 I am thinking in particular of Kelly Dean Jolley, ‘The Nexus of Unity of an Emerson Sentence’, The European Legacy 14, no. 5 (2009): 549–560.

4 See for instance ‘Civilization’, in Society and Solitude (1870). William James called attention to the Emersonian critique of ‘superserviceableness’ in his 1903 address at the Emerson centenary, Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1122.

5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Swedenborg, or the Mystic,' Representative Men, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 53.

6 Hosseini reduces the massive Emerson corpus of ‘40-odd volumes’ (46, 95) to four editions: the Essays and Lectures in the Library of America edition (often unhelpfully cited as EL with no indication of the specific text), an obsolete edition of the Works, the Early Lectures, and the Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks. Inexplicably, the author does not cite the Library of America’s companion volume of Collected Poems and Translations, which contains his manuscript translations of the Persian poets.

7 The author has also neglected an important early source in Emerson’s student composition ‘The Character of Socrates’, in Two Unpublished Essays, ed. Edward Everett Hale (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, 1986), 3–39.

8 Nor has Hosseini availed himself of the excellent philosophical readings of Emerson’s poetry in the Critical Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Tiffany K. Wayne (New York: Facts on File, 2010).